Bilingual Language Development: Children with typical language development and children with language impairment

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Solveig Chilla; Professorin Dr. Cornelia Hamann; Professorin Dr. Monika Rothweiler
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2013 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 229636201

The situation of children growing up in multilingual settings is becoming more and more frequent within the European Union, in general, and, specifically, in France and in Germany. For many of these children, exposure to the national language begins with organized (pre-) school, and therefore acquisition of this language has the status of an early second language (L2) for them. This means that, in these early developmental stages, these children very often perform significantly below monolingual children on standardized language measures. The poor performance characteristic of these early ages has been shown to lead to both over-diagnosis and under-diagnosis of developmental language impairment, each of which is damaging and costly for the individuals, their families, and society as a whole. One of the reasons for over-diagnosis is the general lack of assessment tools for language development in bilingual children due to current incomplete understanding of what constitutes normal language development in bilingual/second language children. The goal of this project is to uncover crosslinguistic ways of identifying language impairment which are independent of the language combinations involved, and which therefore should lead to the validation of crosslinguistic tools for assessing children and also to insight into the underlying nature of developmental language impairment. It is both practically and theoretically relevant to investigate the validity of using not only language specific, but also crosslinguistic criteria for identifying specific language impairment (SLI) in bilingual contexts. We propose to achieve this general aim via systematic investigation of two different target languages (child L2s), French and German, paired with a variety of the same home languages (child L1s), Arabic, Portuguese and Turkish. We hypothesize that this research design will allow for interesting examination of key variables, notably L1 influence and L1 and L2 linguistic typological similarity. A crosslinguistic approach to bilingual language development and SLI may furthermore shed light on theoretical approaches to child bilingualism (simultaneous and successive) and SLI. This project thus aims to contribute to understanding of child multilingualism and SLI, with clear implications for relevant teacher training, and for clinical evaluation by speech-language therapists.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Participating Person: Professorin Laurice Tuller, Ph.D.